Rapping with John Sayles

by Paula Nechak | Published July 31, 1996

PAULA NECHAK (MM): You're phenomenally multidimensional. Do you have a particular area of filmmaking that you primarily look forward to with the greatest sense of anticipation?

JOHN SAYLES (JS): It's editing, actually. So often when I write a movie I have no idea if I'm going to get to make it -- or make it in the next decade. It's taken us so long to get some of our movies made, and I've had to do other lower-budget things first, that you can feel like a real sap when you sit down and write. I like a lot about directing, but it's really stressful because there is always disaster looming with each new shot. The sun may go away, or you might have an actor who starts a new film tomorrow and you still have five scenes to shoot with him. So many things are totally out of your control. It's a bit like trying to write something very serious with a taxi meter next to you. You just see the money ticking off every second you're thinking. When you get to the editing, you're still making the film, you're still working with the actors, their performances, the rhythm of the film. You're still rewriting, but there's not that pressure. It doesn't matter if the sun is shining or not. I know, at that point, I'm gonna make the movie. I know it's not going to fall apart and the money isn't going to disappear from the bank if we get it that far. It's one of the reasons I continue to edit. It's more fun.

MM: Every filmmaker has a place where he or she believes the movie is "made." James Ivory swears by the casting. Scorsese has the brilliant editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. Others might say it's the script. What is it for you?

JS: I think most documentaries are made in editing. I think in features, the editing is part of the writing. To me it's just the third draft. The directing is also part of the writing, part of the storytelling. In a documentary you can take two different editors with two different points of view who weren't there when the footage was shot, and give them the footage on two different AVIDs and come up with enormously different films. One will say this is true, the other will say the exact opposite is true.

MM: You often use the same actors again and again in your movies -- Chris Cooper, Joe Morton, Vincent Spano, David Strathairn, Maggie Renzi. How do you cast? Do you write roles with actors in mind?

JS: I think I very often just start writing, and about a third of the way through I say, "I know who can play this." It really only happens as I'm writing that I might say, "It would be great if I could get Frances McDormand to play this part." Then if it seems the person might do it, it influences what I do. Usually I think I might expand the part because the actor is so good or can bring something personal to it. For example, Joe Morton grew up in a military family and on army bases. So when he took the role of Delmore and got to the set of Lone Star, he was the guy who knew who saluted who.

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994).

MM: Your movies are never thought of in terms of production design, but in terms of story and narrative. How important is the production and art design in your movies for you?

JS: I can't separate any of that stuff from the storytelling. Even when it doesn't seem like anything is going on, that's a choice. Sometimes it's a practical choice. It's traditional and it looks fine, nothing special, because I want people paying attention to the actor. It's labor-intensive. But those elements are just as important as the music, the dialogue, the blocking and camera movement. Production design has to go with the storytelling, so it must be accurate to whatever you're talking about, as well as being a question of tone. If you're making something non-naturalistic or slightly exaggerated in some way as far as dialogue, you want to do something stylized. If you're doing realism, it can look realistic and everyone will say, "Oh, that was gritty realism," but you may have carefully chosen each item in the room and it may not be absolutely realistic. The Coen brothers, while shooting Fargo, said, "Well, the architecture is kind of ugly here so let's just go with that and have everything be fake wood paneling and everything you would not want in your own house."

MM: Because of your entrance into the film world through Roger Corman, do you feel better equipped to handle any emergency which might arise on set, or to work with any size budget?

JS: Corman once said you could make Lawrence of Arabia for $500,000, but it would happen in a tent and someone would just come by and throw sand into the tent once in a while. So I guess my answer would be yes. Part of that is putting things we get from the community into the last draft. The other thing I do in the last draft is very practical stuff, and sometimes it means taking a production value-oriented scene and asking if there is a way to say the same thing in terms of storytelling, get the same thing across, but not spend nearly as much money. It might mean eliminating extras or shooting in daylight instead of at night, or just using a different location. You may have to find that way, because if you can't afford to do a scene well and it turns out badly, it'll either be stuck in the movie and be no good, or you'll cut it anyway, so why bother? It's something I'm very conscious of. Anybody who works in movies eventually has to be conscious of that. What can you do well?

MM: Is it easier for you to get financing now?

JS: Movie by movie it's easy or hard. I have been the major investor in many of the films, including The Secret of Roan Inish, which was horrendously hard to raise money for. Lone Star was really easy. Basically what we can count on is people answering our phone calls, and we might get a good, honest "no" right away so we can move on and look for something else. We get prompter service, but that doesn't necessarily mean that with any given movie it's gonna be an easy road. One thing I continue to do is write for other studios, so if there is a movie I want to make that's not commercial enough to get someone to invest in, I might be able to make it on my own nickel. And it will be a nickel. (Laughs)

Angela Bassett and Joe Morton in City of Hope (1991).

MM: You alluded earlier to getting input from the community. Are you ever surprised by what occurs around youwhen you go on location, by what might be indicative of the community but is miles apart from your thinking and beliefs? Do you seek out ways to integrate it into your film?

JS: Yeah, I leave room for that surprise. With Lone Star we went through the jails in Laredo and Eagle Pass with the sheriffs and talked about what being a Mexican-American sheriff means. In terms of timing, what happens in the imaginary border town of Frontera happened in most of the real towns 10 to 12 years ago. The torch has passed out of the hands of the Anglos, and almost all the judges, sheriffs and mayors are Mexican-American. But it's only been in the last 10 years. We spent a day with the forensics guy, and talked to the border patrol to get that point of view. We talked to the community about how they felt about people coming over. Many would say things like, "They make the dogs bark," or "They leave toilet paper on my grass." Others felt economically, or in terms of image, it was bad. Some said, "Hey, that's how I got here, so more power to them." So it's not really surprise; you know you're not going to be totally accurate, and some of the guesses you've made are just guesses.

MM: An interesting component of Lone Star, and nearly all your films, is the presence of two prejudice-free characters placed in a somewhat hostile environment. Is this an ethical exploration for you?

JS: I think my movies are about people who are insiders but outsiders. Of course the obvious case is The Brother From Another Planet. I wanted to take people into a world that is very much like another planet to them, but I didn't want the guy to be someone who was an outsider in terms of how people reacted to him. So it had to be somebody who passes as an African-American. The dynamic changes if a white guy walks into a black bar. That is, until they figure out who the person is, and then they forget about him. Sam Deeds, the sheriff in Lone Star, is somebody who is accepted as an insider in Frontera. But as Pilar, his high-school girlfriend, says, "You don't want to be sheriff." He is so alienated from it in spirit that he's kind of the Hamlet of the piece. He's very torn. It's an interesting way of looking at a situation. Faulkner did it, a lot of people have done it. Somebody feels alienated from their society, yet they come from it or are accepted within it so they know how it works. You have intimacy and perspective at the same time.

MM: Sam is searching throughout the movie for his legacy and who he is. What was your childhood like? Did you feel compelled to heal the "sins of the father" in order to go on with your life?

JS: Actually my parents were both teachers and their parents were both policemen, so there were a lot of cops in the family. But no, I don't feel I'm going to deal with much that's autobiographical. The most autobiographical movie I've made is Baby It's You and probably City of Hope, and that's really just the milieu. I see many people still in the trap of trying to please or displease their parents. It was never that big a deal for me. They had their problems and I had mine and they weren't the same problems very often.

MM: So making films was never an oblique form of therapy for you?

JS: No. It's therapeutic in that I get to think about things I'm interested in. So I work more on my interests than my problems. Sometimes my movies are my problems. (Laughs) Sometimes it's the story that attracts me to a theme, and sometimes a theme attracts me to a story. Generally I carry it around for quite awhile thinking about it. For example, I had the idea for Passion Fish from the time when I worked in hospitals and was in college and saw Persona. I knew I would do an American version of two women somehow locked together.

Sayles on Passion Fish (1992).

MM: In Lone Star, which contains a rich tapestry of a Texas border town community, both the film and the protagonist have a heavy air of the unspoken. There is minimal text juxtaposed against this richness of opposing cultures. You've created a situation in which the viewer must see instead of hear, which could be construed as antithetical to your usual role as a storyteller.

JS: To a certain extent. Thinking about what the spine of the movie is going to be, I try to find something that is on a personal level. So I wanted there to be two parallel things. First we're going to learn about the social history of this place. But we're also going to deal with people's personal history. One can be a metaphor for the other, but they both seriously affect you. If, for example, they decide it's the depression and we have too many Mexican workers in the United States, and the Anglos are running things at the border, what if they decide to round up your entire town and send you to the other side of the line? What if you were born above it? That's a political and social impact on your life. It also can be about the fact that your father doesn't want you going out with a Mexican girl, which can seriously alter the course of your life if your father is the sheriff of the town. I wanted it, as you said, with visual rather than vocal signals. Sam has to dig to get the vocal signals. That's just the way things are understood because they've always been that way.

MM: Though you give your characters in Lone Star equal expository time, for the most part they push and pull, like puzzle pieces, and in a sense create the ethnicity of the town, the different worlds at odds. I think this is true of your films in general, and I liken it to the term "segregated integration."

JS: There is a tension in the films between the "movie-movie" plot and where I really am interested in going. So I'd say the form of Lone Star is more like a Raymond Chandler novel. It's not so much about who did it, it's about the trip and what you learn about society on that trip. I wanted to make a movie about history and examine different ethnic groups within a small community of ethnic groups, [but] the spine is a murder mystery. Who gets to go into all of those groups as an investigator for me? Of course, a cop or detective of some sort. I wanted him to go into the past, so I thought I'd have him try to solve something that happened in the past. Sam becomes our guide, and he's not necessarily very interesting. As you said, he knows what the situation is. But as he goes there, we who are not from the border learn about what is going on in each community. That tension between the plot and what I want to do thematically is always the trickiest thing for me. To not have it just turn into theme, or a lecture. So then when there is a lecture, like when Pilar is talking about Texas, there's really something else going on.

MM: Perhaps more than any other contemporary filmmaker, your films stand on a wide moral base. You seem concerned with history, with creating something, a sense of the self we've forgone with the rush of technology. This is a tall order, being a storyteller of contemporary myths. Do you ever worry it might make the films a little bit imperious?

JS: No, I don't think you can worry about that stuff and tell stories to other people. Basically, any time you tell a story other people are going to see you're being pretentious. You are pretending, and you may or may not know that it's worth telling to them, instead of just saying, "Hey, they've got eyes, they've got ears, they can figure it out for themselves." (Laughs) The minute you tell a story you're being imperious. It goes with the territory.

Chris Cooper in Matewan.

MM: Lone Star utilizes an interesting style to pull it from past to present. It uses lighting and same-shot temporal pans and could, really, almost be put on in a live-theater atmosphere. Did you plan the theatricality of the time shifts in order to add another level of intimacy with the audience?

JS: No matter what you do, the moment you put something on film it's not theatrical anymore, even if thelanguage is heightened. It's a different visceral experience than being in a room with an actor. Certainly the technique of going from past to present without a cut is a more theatrical technique, but not a theatrical technique that necessarily draws attention to itself. If you see something like Robert Altman's Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, you'll notice that is a much more self-consciously theatrical movie. You see the lighting changes, though you don't see the camera. You see the scrim.

MM: That film was based on a play.

JS: Yes. And there are certain scenes within it that tend to be more theatrical. All of my movies somewhere have a soliloquy -- usually not by the main character. In this one, the scene is with Bunny, Sam's ex-wife, who is the person who is a prisoner of her history. She's the warning for Sam. In Passion Fish it's the woman who makes the anal-probe speech, which is a metaphor for the whole movie. What's interesting is there are all those books of audition pieces based on movie monologues, and they usually sniff that speech out and ask if they can use it because it is a self-contained piece that can be done onstage.

MM: When you write, do you utilize a stream-of-consciousness approach, or do your characters drive your story? Or, does your story drive the characters?

Alfre Woodard and Mary McDonell in Passion Fish (1992).

JS: Generally I work from a very, very specific outline. It's a box that you put people in, and you say, "Okay, this is where we're going to get to and these are the scenes we need." Once I get into the scene, there is much more free association. It's kind of like letting your ego, id and superego all have a chance at doing a draft. So I might write a scene like the one for Bunny in Lone Star and it may initially be 12 pages because I've just let them all go. Then I say, "Okay, that's a short play. Now let's make it fit into a movie." Then you bring around your superego and edit what you've done. Often I just play all the roles and think about what I would need to have a part I can hang onto and be three-dimensional in this thing if I were an actor. How would I see the world? How would I have my day in court if I were this character? Then you may cut it down because the character doesn't need to be quite so expansive.

MM: Return of the Secaucus Seven has been called "arguably your best film" by critics like David Thomson. It was also your first film as a director. Do you feel you have grown as filmmaker from that inceptive effort?

JS: I've grown as a filmmaker. I think if running a movie set is like playing a complicated musical instrument, then I'm better at playing it. I get more on the screen for the amount of money and time that I have. Whether the stories are better or more interesting really depends on whether you're interested in that story or not. I'm talking about moviegoers, not critics. If you have something you respond to in that particular story, it'll be more interesting than if you don't. As far as audiences reacting to each movie, you just have to know it's a conversation and the other person in the conversation brings something to it. Whether your particular movie affects them has to do with what they bring into the theater as well as what is there on the screen, which isn't going to change. MM

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